Conversations with Scorsese (48 page)

MS:
Right.

RS:
But that’s quite a challenge, because someone like Jack, people with those special skills, also have the potential to wreck your picture.

MS:
Totally. But that’s the battle, that’s the war. In this picture Jack’s character controls everything. He has a power of life and death over everybody around him, Leo, Matt, Queenan [the head of the police team trying to bring Nicholson down, played by
Martin Sheen]. Some people feel there is sometimes too much here or there; others feel it all works. You feel your way through it.

I was around a very powerful man—a boss in the underworld in the old neighborhood in the fifties and sixties. At that point everything was changing in that world. I saw the effect this had on him when he started to fall apart. The first people he killed were his closest friends. They buried the bodies in a restaurant.

People would come to my father to talk about it. They didn’t know what to do. The fear was palpable. My father’s younger brother, Joe—the one who “went wrong”—worked for this guy. I recall vividly him rushing into our apartment on Sunday morning out of breath, saying, “I just almost got killed. He pulled a gun on me.” Then my father had to go and deal with certain people my uncle had been ostracized by.

My father always warned me, “These guys are bloodsuckers. Don’t ever, ever, let them do a favor for you, because you’ll never be able to pay it back. Stay away. Just smile, say hello, be respectful.” He was stuck in that world. He was oppressed by it. But he was apparently a person they liked and listened to. My uncle, by the way, lived, but the boss was killed. Apparently the police took the body out of the funeral parlor to determine the cause of his death. It wasn’t natural.

That boss had been very nice to me. I was close friends with his nephew. I would play around his house all the time. But when he turned bad, so to speak, the people around him went down fast. Ultimately he was taken out by his own people. All that went into Jack’s character.

Another scene I really liked was when Jack started singing “Mother Machree” to
Ray Winstone, egging Ray on, and Ray was trying to egg him on. But Ray at a certain point pulled back; he had decided that his character, Mr. French, was going to be a wall. And Frank—Jack—was the only one who trusted him.

Frank is called Francis only by Ray in the picture, if you notice. He is the only one who is trustworthy. Watch what Ray is doing: he’s just staring at other people. When Leo comes in the room, he stares at Leo. Jack starts singing
“Mother Machree,” and I thought it was too much, but then in the editing, I said, “Why don’t we cut from ‘Mother Machree,’ ” which gives this wonderful end to the line, filled with energy, and cut to the two bodies of the people he had gotten killed.

There are some people who say, “Oh, that’s too much.” Well, I’ve seen people sitting in bars who all of a sudden start singing.

It’s all a matter of how you craft it. And the bottom line with Jack is that I saw him take his role places that were both interesting and liberating.

His obscenity, his equation of obscenity and violence, was liberating, for instance. He said, “Listen, after I hit the kid, break his hand, why don’t I then go to my girlfriend?” When he does, she goes, “What’s got you all hot and bothered?” He says, “I’ll tell you in a minute. Come in the car, I’ll show you.” It’s the direct relationship between the violence and the sex.

Jack was saying, That exists, let’s show it. I felt it wasn’t only a film about
Frank Costello. It’s the obscenity and the violence that he represents that permeates the picture, permeates that world. But as I say, if I had been able to work with Jack on a twenty-week shoot, I don’t know what it would have been like. Or if I had worked with Jack in this picture ten years ago, maybe it would have been different.

Sly psychopath:
Jack Nicholson as Frank Costello in a rare relatively calm moment in
The Departed.

RS:
My impression of Jack, and I don’t know him at all well, is that at his age, he is going to do what he wants to do. You’re hiring him for a certain kind of dangerousness that is completely unpredictable.

MS:
That’s right.

RS:
And you have to give him that privilege.

MS:
You discover that the first day you walk on the set. You think it’s going to be fortuitous for the movie, though, you think the picture’s going to be taken in a better direction—and that you’re going to go with it.

RS:
Well, is that one of the aspects of your nature that sets your work apart from other directors, that you will take those chances with actors who are, let’s put it as politely as possible, unpredictable, and may do things that are very difficult for you to handle, because they are going to push the picture in directions so that you may not actually be able to put it together sensibly?

MS:
Yes. I had to take that chance.

RS:
You’ve done it more than once.

MS:
Yes, I have. And when you do, it’s always a battle. Sometimes a picture gets away from you and sometimes it doesn’t. What I felt about the first four weeks of shooting
The Departed
was that it was not going smoothly, it was not going as planned. I knew Jack was bringing new stuff in, because we had been working on it before I started shooting. So I was very interested to see what was going to happen when we got to his scenes. But I do like to take the chances, although it can be nerve-racking.

RS:
The language in
The Departed
is as brutal as some of the action, it seems to me, and even in today’s world, dangerous to employ.

MS:
I’m not going to say it doesn’t exist, because it exists. It’s not about giving a bad image to some ethnic group. That is the reality, that is what happens.

RS:
You know, that fits my theory of what was really so loathesome about movie censorship.

MS:
Oh, my God, it was so crazy.

RS:
Not talking about the
sexual revolution on film made it much harder to deal with than if they were just talking on the screen like normal Americans talk.

MS:
I think you’re absolutely right about that. I was part of that revolution, or, to put it another way, I was probably the only one who wasn’t sexually liberated.

RS:
If you say so. And then everybody went nuts about that, as if America was about to fall into moral shreds.

MS:
It’s like what Chairman Mao said, or was it his wife: If the revolution stops revolving, it’s no longer a revolution. Therefore we must continue with the Cultural Revolution.

It became an obsession, and the next thing you know, town houses are blowing up on 11th Street.

RS:
Two houses from where I lived.

MS:
Geez. This is why I liked a lot of
Julie Taymor’s film,
Across the Universe.
It touches upon all these elements, and you get to see how it all fits together. And somehow the lyrics, the music, give you the period. What a decade! What a time!

RS:
That’s for sure.

MS:
What a time to have gone through. That’s why at the age of thirteen or fourteen, whether you liked the Kramer films or not, he did tackle certain subjects that made you think, subjects that weren’t being talked about elsewhere.

RS:
The censorship was far worse than just sexual censorship. It came up in the course of my history of
Warner Bros. For example, in the late thirties they wanted to make movies that warned America about the threat of
Nazism. The Breen Office [the censors for the movie industry] said no. Breen wrote a letter to Warners and said, “We feel you can’t make this movie, because how can you say these terrible things about Hitler? Look at all the good he’s been doing for the German people.” To their credit, they told him to go screw himself. It was more than that you couldn’t show a woman’s breasts or you couldn’t say “hell” and “damn.” They were interfering in real issues, political issues. It’s very disturbing.

MS:
Yes.

RS:
Because you keep this lid on.

MS:
Certain philosophical and political points are made in the storytelling, and if they’re softened or skipped—well, it just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Art is art. So the censorship concept is very important, because we were—many of us are—formed by mass entertainment.

RS:
Of course.

MS:
That’s why when in
The Departed
Jack equates sex with violence as part of the thrill, that was liberating. I don’t know if there was enough of it in the film, quite honestly, because there was a whole struggle going back and forth with the studio on that. The nature of his language, the obscenity of his language, was different from the kind of vulgar language that we used in
Goodfellas
or
Casino.

RS:
Can you characterize the difference?

MS:
It had kind of a mean edge to it. I’m saying he got something in there that directly equated language with violence.

RS:
There is a specificity in his language. It’s not just a casual “Hey, motherfucker.”

MS:
No. There’s a meaning there.

RS:
What he says is probably literally going to happen.

MS:
It’s going to happen. In that scene when Jack says, “You like little Miss Freud sucking on your dick,” it’s very specific. Jack was saying, If you do your job, these
are your benefits. You get them from me. You enjoy it? Good. But where the hell were you? You were supposed to be there, you weren’t there.

The specificity cuts away all the nonsense. That’s the nature of the world they’re in. What I loved about Matt’s character: he tries to pretend he’s in a somewhat different world—an apartment that’s a little more upgraded, and he buys croissants, you know, and dies.

That’s why I love what
Bill Monahan did in the script at the end, when
Mark Wahlberg is there with the gun pointing at
Matt Damon, and Matt looks at him and he says, “Okay.” And then he gets shot. Okay, he’s saying, I’m so tired. I made it as far as here. Now just take me out. I’m not up to this. I was never up to it. Just finish me off.

He even tries to pretend otherwise. In the scene in the theater, he tries to say, Frank, what are you doing? What are you, crazy? And he’s trying to actually talk to him. He’s trying to put on the appearance of a responsible citizen. Yes, I work for you. But I’m still a policeman, and I still have some power.

Jack pointed out to me, “He’s sitting behind me.” He mentioned the word “confession.” And I realized he made the porno theater the confessional. If you look at it, he’s like a priest. The priest doesn’t see your face when you’re in the confessional. It was wonderful, I told him.

RS:
Did you just instinctively stage it that way?

MS:
Well, he couldn’t sit next to him, so he had to sit behind him. Then we looked at it and he looked like the kindly old priest that Barry Fitzgerald played in
Going My Way.
Only a slightly more demented version. And there’s this guy, you know, leaning over, recounting his sins, so to speak, to him. And the priest is another kind of priest, really.

RS:
Putting it mildly.

MS:
The whole porno theater takes on a very different aspect—very Catholic—about sex and guilt and confession, and it all seemed to come together there. I think Jack understood that. I don’t know his personal life that much. But some of the stories he told me made me think he understood the impact of Catholicism on the Irish and the Irish American. And also the differences between Irish Catholicism and Italian Catholicism.

RS:
It sounds as if the picture, on the whole, was pretty satisfying for you.

MS:
I was just hoping for some sort of financial success with
The Departed.
I figured pretty much that that would be it for me, that I wouldn’t do any more studio pictures.

RS:
What would you do?

MS:
More
independent films. I didn’t see where I could fit into the system anymore, given what the system needs at this point in time. Having come off
Gangs of New York
and then
Aviator,
I just didn’t know anymore that I could go on making films under corporate control. I don’t say that the people who made the film with me at Warner Bros. were difficult to work with. It was a matter of whether I have what they need, what the corporation needs. And how much of an effort it will take.